On a typical morning on Ben Hewitt's small farm in Cabot, Vt., he and his wife, Penny, and their two sons wake up early. But after doing the chores and eating breakfast, Fin, 12, and Rye, 9, don't have to run for the school bus.

Instead, they spend the morning reading Gary Paulsen tales, or they strap on pack baskets they wove themselves, carrying small knives at their belts, and head out to build shelters and forage in the woods.

News

4:49 pm

Thu September 4, 2014

It's been a year since the Service Employees International Union started organizing protests calling for the fast food industry to adopt a minimum wage of $15 an hour. The union says that workers will strike in 150 cities on Thursday, but, as Anne Mostue of WGBH reports, few workers are actually leaving their shifts.

Since May, Amazon and the publisher Hachette have been locked in a battle over the pricing of e-books. For customers it's meant that they can't pre-order books from authors such as J.K. Rowling and James Patterson. And it's upset many authors because it's made their work less available. But Amazon is willing to upset some customers and authors as it pursues a long-term strategy for books.

Perdue Farms says it has ditched the common practice of injecting antibiotics into eggs that are just about to hatch. And public health advocates are cheering. They've been campaigning against the widespread use of antibiotics in agriculture, arguing that it's adding to the plague of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Though Halloween is still two months away, ghouls are already starting to haunt the shelves of retailers. Spending on decorations is second only to Christmas. Last year Americans spent nearly $7 billion on Halloween — especially for elaborate costumes and home decorations.

Steel mills, unions and the Democratic Party have defined politics in Pueblo, Colo., for decades. But that doesn't discourage George Rivera.

"When we look at values, when we look at who we are, especially as Hispanics, our values tend to be conservative," Rivera says.

Rivera, a retired deputy police chief, is going door to door for votes in a neighborhood east of downtown, near where he grew up. Last summer, he unseated local Democrat Angela Giron in the state Legislature, in a high-profile recall election that focused on guns.

Dawn Gioia lives just two blocks away from City Hall in Brighton, Colo., just north of Denver. She never expected to receive a thick envelope from Mid-Continent Energy in the mail, proposing she sell mineral rights for oil and gas drilling.

At first, she thought it was a scam.

"One of these forms asks you for all your tax information and Social Security numbers, so that was something that sort of caught me off guard," she says.

Business

4:55 pm

Wed September 3, 2014

CVS has rebranded itself, changing its corporate name from CVS Caremark to CVS Health. On the very same day, the company has also fulfilled a promise it made earlier this year: No more cigarettes on its store shelves. For more on the decisions, Audie Cornish talks to Bruce Japsen, who covers health care business for Forbes.

Technology

6:55 pm

Tue September 2, 2014

To learn more about the recent celebrity photo hack, Melissa Block speaks with Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University. They discuss how the photos might have been obtained, as well as how you can protect your own material saved to the cloud.

Tom Hanks' love affair with typewriters began in the 1970s, with his first proper typewriter — a Hermes 2000. Typewriters are "beautiful works of art," he tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "And I've ended up collecting them from every ridiculous source possible."

Hanks admits he started his collection when he had a "little excess cash" but, he points out, it's "better to spend it on $50 typewriters than some of the other things you can blow show-business money on."

Asia

5:10 pm

Tue September 2, 2014

Two U.S. news organizations, CNN and the Associated Press, were granted interviews with three men detained by North Korean authorities. To learn more about why, and what North Korea hopes to gain from the publicity, Melissa Block talks with Georgetown professor Victor Cha, the former director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

Mine-resistant, ambush-protected troop carriers, known as MRAPs, were built to withstand bomb blasts. They can weigh nearly 20 tons, and many U.S. troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are alive today because of them. But many of the vehicles are now considered military surplus, so thanks to a congressionally mandated Pentagon program, they're finding their way to hundreds of police and sheriff's departments.

News

4:50 pm

Tue September 2, 2014

In a new video released by the militant group Islamic State, American journalist Steven Sotloff appears to be killed by extremists associated with the group. U.S. officials are working to determine the video's authenticity.

Sun August 31, 2014

It's hard to comprehend the toll Sri Lanka's civil war took on the South Asian country. The United Nations estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 people lost their lives in the conflict — all on an island just slightly larger than West Virginia.

Ethnic tensions between two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka — the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils — simmered through the '60s and '70s. The civil war officially began in 1983 and continued until 2009.

If there's a Mozart of garage rock, it's Ty Segall. He's put out at least a dozen albums of face-melting, critic-adored low-fi rock, in the style of bands like The Troggs or The Stooges — not to mention his work with other bands and in other styles.

But his newest album, Manipulator, is different: more produced and polished. Segall came to NPR West to talk about the album with NPR's Arun Rath — and play a few songs for us.